(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Jonson was an English playwright and poet.
Books are often our best teachers because they do not threaten or challenge our self interests as a living teacher might. We should look to ancient authors, but not by making them dictators: they have “opened the gates, and made the way, that went before us; but as Guides, not Commanders” (Jonson 1953, 54–5). In reading we should “calmly study the separation of opinions, find the errors have intervened, awake Antiquity, call former times into question; but make no parties with the present” (p. 55). We must also turn this critical, disinterested attitude on our own judgements and motives to identify the prejudices and expectations we bring to the text. In this way our first obligation is neither to the author nor ourselves, but to knowledge and truth.
Reading in itself was unimportant to Jonson; his interest was the many uses to which it could be put. His process of self-education through reading was a project of self-fashioning—establishing social status and self-worth. It inspired his literary career but also provided him with authorities to legitimise his artistic decisions. Reading was not a passive escape from the world for him but a way of entering and responding to it. He realised the interdependence of knowledge and power: “Learning needs rest: Sovereignty gives it. Sovereignty needs counsel: Learning affords it” (p. 75).
This study was vigorous and mentally demanding, yet relaxation was important, too, because “The mind is like a Bow, the stronger for being unbent” (p. 40). The variety of making “diverse studies, at diverse hours” helps “refresh, and repair us … As when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write” (p. 39). The reader should be akin to “an explorer, with all the distinction, excitement, hard work, and sacrifice the comparison implies” (Evans 1995, 25 (quoted in)).
The educated reader benefits society, and, indeed, reading was not an entirely private activity for Jonson. It could set a social precedent in terms of the material read displaying the reader’s manners and character. His culture was “essentially oral and public”—“print had not yet made reading an entirely private act”—so public reading and listening could become socially competitive, self-serving performances to enhance one’s character—sometimes by misrepresenting the author (ibid.). In Inviting a Friend to Supper, Jonson presents a positive example of reading in community (Jonson 1988, 70):
Evans glosses: “Physical and intellectual nourishment are juxtaposed… The words of ancient authors stimulate new thoughts, and the occasion of social reading becomes a spur to individual self-expression” (1995, 45).
In another poem, To the Same, a man is praised for a “well-made choice of friends, and book” and for “making thy friends books, and thy books friends” (Jonson 1988, 61). Both friends and books required reading and interpreting, and could be approached in similar, profitable ways, and the judgement that one displays in their choice of books and friends speaks to their character.
In To the Reader Jonson writes (p. 35):
This importance he places on the reader’s judgement was also expressed in the dedication of his comedy Epicoene; Or, The Silent Woman: “Read therefore, I pray you, and censure” (Jonson 1966, 3). We should judge a book with a combination of assertiveness and humility, because in judgement we reveal our own character, opening ourselves to judgement. To strive to “read it well” the reader does credit to the book and themselves, and takes care because “only a careful reading—one that scrutinizes his own motives and reactions as closely as the book—will produce true understanding” (Evans 1995, 38).